[rfc-i] New version: draft-hoffman-utf8-rfcs-04.txt

[Joe Touch]

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Julian Reschke wrote:
> Joe Touch wrote:
>> I thought there was consensus to NOT include the BOM in these files (at
>> least there were three of us who spoke up on the issue).
> 
> There were people in favor (such as myself), and people arguing against
> it. Nobody has declared consensus.

I saw only three messages about it...

> 
>> If support for UTF-8 was in fact as universal as asserted in this doc,
>> why is a BOM needed at all?
> 
> That has nothing to do with UTF-8 support being universal or not.
> 
> The issue is that once encoding information is lost (such as when
> transferred via FTP, or loaded from the file system), many clients use a
> default encoding. 

So the default is ASCII, not UTF-8.

> Some of those clients however look at the start of the
> file, detect the BOM, and use UTF-8 instead (such as Notepad and Wordpad).

"some" sounds like a strange reason; if it were "most" or "nearly all"
that'd be different...

> So this is a problem of text/plain (not having optional inline encoding
> information such as XML or HTML), not a problem of UTF-8.

Text/plain is ASCII; UTF-8 creates the problem by deliberately
overloading text/plain to also mean UTF-8.

Joe



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